The developer of Sync for Reddit is working on a Lemmy app

Chloyster [she/her]@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 962 points –
reddit.com

New subreddit talking about it here. I'm assuming it will eventually be a Lemmy community

https://reddit.com/r/SyncforLemmy

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lol:

I'm genuinely excited though. I've been a long time sync user, and I'd love to see similar features available for Lemmy!

like if the app is serving different content than the browser....

But in the app they can fingerprint you better, allowing them to better identify the criminal scum using third party apps.

It’s the experience of viewing the content you grumpy person!

Just WOW! I'm using SyncPro for 9+ years, I'll support this app for sure!!!

Same! Although probably not as long. But Sync was consistently my go to even after trying other android apps.

I actually prefer infinity, but the dev is trying to implement a subscription service. Of cause you can also compile it yourself with your own api key, but it doesnt seam like he's switching to Lemmy

I really enjoyed my short time with Infinity. I was just seeing what else is out there and that one checked almost all of my boxes. I couldn't get over the bright ass green they used when a comment was fully collapsed though. Still a fantastic app and I hope that dev continues to succeed.

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Mlem is a good beginning, but I hope for an Apollo-level quality app for Lemmy. It'll come, in time. And perhaps SyncForLemmy will be just that!

That is our goal with Mlem. And trust me, our team is working, as absolutely fast as we can! Keep in mind, though, we’re starting from scratch. 😁

Thank you for working on this! I love Mlem and am excited to see how it develops.

I’m using the app now, and it has seen some real improvements.

Are you guys taking feedback seriously? I don’t want to dump it in a circular bin.

Have to assume it’ll be Android-only like Sync for Reddit is/was, right?

There was a Sync for iOS beta at one point... in the dark days before Apollo.

Likely at first, but Sync for Reddit has a TestFlight for an iOS Version. I suspect that effort could be carried over if the porting process isn’t too arduous.

I think it’s only a matter of time. I hope Lemmy/fediverse keeps up the momentum, it’s so great being off Reddit.

There's also Memmy. https://testflight.apple.com/join/6jaRU6rD

But it's also unfinished

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Obviously lemmy.world isnt the ideal location for beehaw users to follow but you dont need to be logged in to view content so I'd suggest just browsing the syncforlemmy community natively for now. Right now there are no official posts by ljdawson anyways.

https://lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy

Seems like a consequence of beehaw's actions

it may seem that way, but that's not accurate. something had to be done to stem the trolls and lemmy doesn't provide any tools for less severe action.

You're describing the reasoning behind the decision. The fact that this is a consequence of that decision remains the same.

I don't agree. I think it's disingenuous to isolate the decision from the context as if it were made unprompted. it comes across as if you are blaming the admins for something you don't like - if that's not your intent, then what is ?

I think it’s disingenuous to isolate the decision from the context as if it were made unprompted.

There's nothing in my comment to suggest that, and I think you're projecting here.

it comes across as if you are blaming the admins for something you don’t like - if that’s not your intent, then what is ?

I think many unintended consequences occurred from the defederation, and this situation is an excellent tangible example of that.

I don't think it was unintended in the sense that the admins didn't expect these consequences. At least to me, on their posts they seem very aware that what they're doing is very damaging, but they were stuck with choosing between the lesser of two evils, and they choose what was going to keep them more sane for now.

I mean yes it is a consequence of beehaw's actions. Those actions were justified though and the consequences mild considering how easy it is to view a community without being logged in.

I'm not sure why you're so defensive about it, but ok?

Im not being defensive. I'm agreeing with you but adding context for other people. It's legitimately consequences of beehaw's actions. Those actions have a valid reason though.

Your post is specifically worded/presented in a way to illicit a reaction from people, which you got. So it's fair for me to qualify my answer when I agree with you.

Amazing news. I loved Sync. If the developer could just imitate what they did with Sync but for Lemmy that would be great!

Lol I clicked the link and reddit showed

This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.

With the only two options being continue in the app or take me home

If you edit the URL and remove everything before reddit.com and the change it to old.reddit.com you can view it without the app

I can't follow this logic of Reddit's. Ohh, a community hasn't been reviewed to ensure it's safe? Oh, a community is NSFW? Gee golly, if you're on a mobile phone you'll have to use our app to look at it! We can't have that open to the internet (unless you're on desktop then you're all good, until we make an official desktop app)

How's Sync compared to Reddit Is Fun? I've never used the former

Sync was my favorite reddit app personally, its not the most similar to RIF though. As far as I understand RIF was more like old.reddit.com. Sync utilizes a lot of modern UI choices but the layout has always been really nice and has had amazing customization

Not like RIF, more modern space wasting with the 'card' approach. Although I'm not sure about customisation, I just remember trying it and it had the same design 'flaws' every other had until I stumbled into RIF, which was perfect.

Would love a RIF-like app.

Sync was very big on customizability, so it did have the options to make your view incredibly compact as well. By default, it was always set to follow very closely with Google's design language, but you could get something very similar to the density of RIF as well.

Did it have the option to swipe between posts instead of needing to click on each one? It was a basic feature of the official reddit app that I'm surprised more 3rd party apps didn't emulate. Joey was the only android app that I found that had it

An option for a left to right swipe that goes through all posts on a subreddit one by one with a big media-centric post view? I haven't used the official app, but if that's what you're looking for, it does! I can't think of a single way to view reddit that Sync didn't have support for.

Sweet, that's exactly what I'm looking for. Sync will almost definitely be my goto for lemmy then, once it's a thing.

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Jerboa in List mode looks like Sync

Pro comment here, I always liked the compact content view and was wondering how to change it. This should hold me over until sync is out !

So much so that I assumed it was the inspiration.

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As someone who paid for Sync Pro, I would gladly pay the developer again for a Lemmy app. I just hope /u/ljdawson won't opt for a "subscription" based app.

100%. The few bucks I spent on Sync Pro were some of the best dollars I've spent.

Sync was my preferred app. Will pay money again for a lemmy version

I'm a Relay man myself, but Sync was a close second. Can't wait for the Lemmy version of it.

Very exciting! Jerboa is nice but it's always great to have alternatives.

Great news. Sync made Reddit usable for me, as I was able to easily filter out keywords and subs that were problematic.

Wow, tried to view it on my mobile and just got a pop up from reddit saying it's unreviewed content and I should be careful, ONLY giving me the options either to leave or download the official reddit app to view it.

this has been my reddit app for over a decade!!! this just made my entire day!!

That's my favorite reddit client. I was hoping someone would do a similar client for Lemmy. This is great news, I'd totally buy a paid version of Sync for Lemmy just to support the developer.

In a few months we’ll probably have a dozen Lemmy apps. Sync, Mlem, Memmy (which I’m typing this from), Artemis, and several others I’ve seen posts about are already in development. Excited to see what people create!

Yesssssssss - by far my most used app. would happily pay for another pro version.

Cool, that would be ideal for me as its the reddit app I use(d).

This accelerated my plans to join Lemmy immensely and, et voila. Sync is probably the best software app I have on my phone, simply from a design perspective.

This is amazing news! I like Jerboa but I've been using Sync for many years now. It's just so dang good.

Just using firefox android's Add Site To Homepage button for lemmy has worked pretty well for me. i have jeroba but i like the web app a little better. i am open to trying newer lemmy apps as they come out though.

When I used Android Sync was my favorite client and it wasn't even close for second place. But I'm iOS now so I will patiently wait for someone to build something great over here. Android users are lucky to have such a great dev moving over to Lemmy!

Thank goodness, sync was the app that worked the best for me! Awesome to see more apps coming out already

And Boost will apparently be included as a patchable app in ReVanced Manager, allowing any user to use thir own API. i'm sure there could have been a very sensible way for 3rd party app developers continue their amazing work and Reddit get a share of the profits...This Elon Effect is stupid to a default

That's incredible news, I've always used Sync

I switched away from Sync to Boost some years ago, but would happily switch back for a Fediverse app. Jerboa is okay, but it doesn't have the slick look I've come to expect from reddit apps like Sync and Boost.

Jerboa also doesn't have volume button comment navigation, which was one of my favorite features

Jerboa has a couple of weird UI issues, like losing your scroll position when you exit a comments thread, and I could do with it having a bit more contrast in the 'threaded comments' view, see who said what - it's a bit pale for my eyes. But it makes some things much easier than the desktop view of Lemmy, like navigating all the federation.

https://lemmy.ml/c/syncforlemmy or search !syncforlemmy@lemmy.ml in your instance.

Edit: Official community modded by Ljdawson himself is: !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world

I haven't been able to subscribe to any community hosted by lemmy.ml for quite awhile. When I click subscribe it just says subscription pending. I figured it was because of their server load at first, but since it's still happening I'm not so sure. Anybody else having this issue?

I'm out of the loop, why is it unfortunate? I'm guessing it was defederated for some reason.

It's mentioned in the comment section that the developer made /c/syncforlemmy@lemmy.world as the community for the new project.

You'd need the full link since beehaw defederated with lemmy.world. But you can keep track without needed an account.

https://lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy

Why are they defederated?

The announcement is here: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

The tl;dr is that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works have open registration, which Beehaw doesn't like since it makes it trivial to harass/troll people. Beehaw has some questions you have to answer when signing up to try and reduce the amount of undesirable/negative behaviour, but that doesn't stop someone from just signing up on another instance and bypassing Beehaw's requirements.

I think this will eventually be properly solved with some more powerful moderation tools, but Lemmy isn't quite there yet.

That seems quite exciting, I'm personally hoping to see a platform agnostic Lemmy application available for desktop operating systems as that would be a really nice and convenient way for users to interact.

If you're running W11, you can run Android applications through the windows subsystem for Android, much like the w subsystem for Linux.

Or, blue stax is quite good in my experience

Dream come true right there. I used sync since 2012? 2013? A long damned time anyways, and I'd love to continue.

Same, I switched between Relay and Sync a couple times in the early days, but I stuck with Sync (pro and then dev) for the long haul. Without that, there would have been no Reddit for me, which is why I'm here now and thrilled by this news.

It is good, if only because it means the Lemmy developers can focus on back end development.

I think the team that works on the Lemmy Android app (Jerboa) is a separate team to the team that works on the Lemmy backend.

Great news!, if kbin implements a lemmy-like api (which is being discussed) this app would be entirely compatible as well!

awesome news! i used to jump between Sync and Boost for reddit.

I know Christian mentioned he wouldn't port Apollo to Lemmy, but I haven't given up hope just yet!

I didn’t know that, he say why?

He mentioned it in his "Apollo will close down on June 30th" post on /r/ApolloApp (I'm linking it here, but here's the quote so you don't have to gift Reddit your traffic):

Will you build a competitor? Move to one of the existing alternatives?

I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.

These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.

I think what he's getting at here is people asking him about building an alternative platform to Reddit - much like Lemmy, Kbin, Tildes, etc. are - as opposed to an app serving as the frontend for an existing alternative platform. I've seen poeple buzzing about that on some of those threads about Apollo on Reddit. Those people are so in denial, and there were so many of them, that I couldn't conjure to effort to point how ridiculous that idea is. Some people did, and were quickly shut down with the usual complaints (fediverse is confusing / doesn't work, etc.)

The whole insistence that the fediverse is too complicated is so strange to me. People are acting like you need to know how to federate multiple servers in order to make/read posts. It's been exactly the same experience as setting up an account on any other website for me. The only difference is I had to spend five minutes understanding what an instance and how to find communities on instances that are not my own.

Some people are just fundamentally resistant to any kind of change, I suppose.

I agree. It's just people being lazy and resistant to change. The irony is that it was exactly those "big techs" that bred this kind of behavior on them, now they turn around to criticize those big techs, but have no spine to do what actually takes to change that, so they keep on taking the abuse.

I thought I was getting the hang of it until I couldn't find communities. I pasted the link into jerboa and it still can't find it.. I can see the community on a feddit directory but I can't find it in jerboa.

It may be a bug, I've been seeing some weird quirks in Jeroba myself, though I'll admit I'm still figuring it out.

I don't know about Jerboa, but this happens on the web too, and it's usually on more fringe / less popular communities. There's a workaround that works for me, I mostly heard about it from someone else here on Lemmy. It's not great user experience, but it works.

  • Go to the search function;
  • Type in the name of the community, hit enter;
  • Select "Commnities" on the search type dropdown (yes, you have to do it after submitting the search as per the previous steps, seems like another UI bug);
  • If after doing the above the community is not found, then here enters the magic sauce:
    • Change the search terms so the community is fully qualified / keyed as !communityname@instance.server, all in lowercase. So, for example, if you're looking for the "kreisvegs" community on feddit.de, type !kreisvegs@feddit.de on the search field;
    • Submit. It still won't be found. Give it a few seconds, change back the search terms to only the community name (without the instace and "!" at the start). Submit. It should now show up.

You may have to repeat step 4 onwards a couple times, sometimes.

My uneducated guess as to what's happening: the federated communities listing is probably cached on the instance, and by default it'll only look for communities cached on your instance. My guess is that federated communities only gets into the instance cache when members of the current instance have searched / subscribed to that community. Typing the fully qualified community name on the search field (which is the tip I got from someone else) apparently forces the search function to actually contact the external instance to look for the community, instead of looking in the cache, but that can take some time, hence why you should wait a few seconds on the 6th step. That guess could also explain the problem also happening on Jerboa, since the problem would be server-side.

That's kinda ignorant of the HUGE amount of work it takes to build an alternative Reddit, not to mention the community management and moderation tools.

Why not just deploy a Lemmy instance, turn off federation and call it a day?

Apollo is also more than just a consumer for an API, they run their own servers as well create a better user experience.

Ok I had read that too. A different interpretation of your take on that is that he builds products (the app that accesses content) not the whole platform itself (Reddit or Lemmy). So it’s still possible he could build an app for Lemmy. He just wouldn’t try to build the whole ecosystem like Lemmy is.

Yay! I've been using Sync Pro for a few years and love it.

Sync was my Reddit app of choice, this is great news for Lemmy.

Looks like I need a Lemmy account!

A kbin API is in the works, if we manage to make it compatible with lemmy this app would be usable for kbin as well.

Hopefully kbin API will become compatible with Lemmy's soon

Or someone just makes a library that supports both, and clients use that library.

That's what I'm hoping for. I don't want a bunch of accounts depending on what device I'm using, I want to have one account on a platform that I like and have good interfaces for using it.

That's why I left reddit, they removed my ability to do that by killing Boost.

ive never got to use any third-party app for reddit, just the official one... as matter of fact i just discovered that such thing existed when the current crisis began lol. since i decided to flee of that dictatorial ship and now found myself here, kinda lost, id like to ask u guys if this "Sync for Reddit" was good and if we can expect the lemmy version to be as well (ofc, taking into acc the differences between both platforms).

im asking that to be able deciding if i should watch it up close or nah. thanks guys

Sync was widely regarded as the best third-party app for Android. I preferred a different one, but I don't think it's shutting down for another 10 days, so you can always open it up and try it

It was the best. I have tried most reddit apps but that one could be customized exactly how I wanted and it was great. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Good? The best one. I started to use Sync in 2013, there was no official app, only a couple of 3rd party ones. I tried them all a couple of days and Sync was vastly superior. I bought it and used it almost 10 years!

It was my favorite of the apps I tried. Really clean interface and a good dev.

It was my favorite app for a number of years. Pretty easy to use out of the box, but it came with an overwhelming number of things you could customize so you could have precisely the reddit experience you wanted. Pricing was fair at US$1.06/mo for the paid version. I can't recall ever running into any bugs in the time I used it.

I'd say it's worth keeping an eye on.

When I read about this yesterday, I was so damn happy about it! I loved Sync for the last ~10 years and I am thrilled to have the dev on lemmy. Its going to be awesome!

Thank god. Sync is the app I was using before this entire shitshow.

Ah great, i was almost giving up on such a thing happening (the other devs doing great work tho of course)

That's awesome to hear! Hope there's a lot of code that doesn't need to be changed.

And here I am, sitting and hoping someone with coding skills will make a Slide for Lemmy.

Holy Cow, thats some freaking great news!

This is fantastic news. By far the best Reddit app for Android, so I have no doubt the lemmy version will also be fantastic.

Ahhh! Yes!!! Sync is my baby, dripfeeding my mainline supply of reddit for the last several years. Bought the lifetime and don't regret it. I'm excited!

!syncforlemmy@lemmy.world Does this work?

Beehaw is defederated from lemmy.world so it doesn't work.